Learn how to communicate more effectively at work and achieve your goals. Taught by award-winning Wharton professor and best-selling author Maurice Schweitzer, Improving Communications Skills is an essential course designed to give you both the tools you need to improve your communication skills, and the most successful strategies for using them to your advantage. You'll learn how to discover if someone is lying (and how to react if they are), how to develop trust, the best method of communication for negotiation, and how to apologize. You'll also learn when to cooperate and when to compete, how to create persuasive messages, ask thoughtful questions, engage in active listening, and choose the right medium (face-to-face conversation, video conference, phone call, or email) for your messages. By the end of the course, you'll be able to understand what others want, respond strategically to their wants and needs, craft convincing and clear messages, and develop the critical communication skills you need to get ahead in business and in life.

OW

I did really enjoy the course. I gave a different perspective on situations and personal behaviour. The approach was very effective and the knowledge sticks in your mind. Very good.

AP

May 15, 2019

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Professor Maurice Schweitzer is obviously an expert in this field, and it was great to be able to learn from him. Course was very useful and thoughtfully presented.\n\nThank you!

Из урока

Effective Communication

This module was designed to teach you both the key principles of effective communication, and how to harness the power of setting goals to improve your performance. You’ll learn how to create memorable and persuasive messages, ask thoughtful questions, engage in active listening, and choose the right medium (face-to-face conversation, video conference, phone call, or email) for your messages. You'll also learn the how to use goal setting for maximum benefit while avoiding the common pitfalls of overly ambitious targets. By the end of this module, you'll be able to communicate effectively using the right medium, and use goal-setting to increase your productivity and boost your performance.

Преподаватели

Maurice Schweitzer

Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions

Текст видео

Goal setting turns out to be an incredibly powerful tool, it's a fundamental part of motivation. Goal setting can drive us to do great things, goal setting can also drive us to do very bad things, but first I want to think about the benefits of goal setting. There are over 400 managerial studies that have looked at goal setting and there are dozens and dozens more that have looked at behavior and goal setting, whether it's delivering mail, it's welding, it's sewing. In athletics when people have specific challenging goals they increase their efforts, they increase persistence, and they increase performance. That's the general result and it's a very robust and replicable finding. In fact, some of the most foundational goal-setting scholars have said, the beneficial effects of goal setting on task performance is one of the most robust and replicable findings in the psychology literature. And indeed it is, that is psychologically just setting a challenging goal will boost performance. And the relationship between goal difficulty and task performance over a wide range is almost linear. That is, the more difficult the goal the higher the performance, this is particularly true for effort based tasks. So tasks where we just need people to work a bit harder, greater goals will boost motivation and often boost performance. We also know that goal proximity matters, so you want to break down goals into smaller pieces when people are close to reaching that goal. So the end of the month, and we're almost at the goal, that's when people are particularly motivated. So, close to that goal people work extra hard, you can look at this, there are studies of runners. If you look at a marathon race, there are big spikes right by round numbers, people are racing to get in under a specific time. Now, goals work by focusing our attention, they're increasing our effort, and boosting persistence. So what we want to do to harness the benefits of goal setting is to set clear, specific goals. They should be challenging, but also realistic if we have past performance. So, how fast we've run on prior races, or how much people on this factory line can perform, or sales goals based on past performance. We want to set goals around the 80th to 90th percentile of performance, so challenging, but also credible. And if we can set a series of short-term goals, like goals every month rather than goals for the whole year, we're likely to see greater benefits to setting goals. The next part involves committing to goals and this is one reason why the goal has to be realistic, people have to believe they can get there. So, if they visualize it, they write it down, they tell other people. I noticed sometimes if I tell other people, it'll be embarrassing if I fall short, so they will steel my resolve to that goal. We also want to think about developing a plan. So, how can I achieve that goal? What steps do I need to take to get there? That action plan will all help us get to the goal, and of course clear feedback is important. That is, we want to make sure we're getting feedback along the way, and remember that when we're particularly close to the goal that's what's going to boost the performance the very most.